[lbo-talk] WSJ: IBM Memos On Outsourcing Strategy

Jon Johanning jjohanning at igc.org
Mon Jan 26 14:55:15 PST 2004


On Monday, January 26, 2004, at 12:52 PM, <davidyee59 at sympatico.ca> quoted Joey Slinger of the Toronto Star:


> Burger flippers and Starbucks servers and Home Depot clerks who
> collect minimum wage, or a buck or two above it, aren't working class,
> they're the working poor

Cute phrase-making, but in fact, Joey, they very definitely *are* working-class -- just hard-to-organize working-class.


> A lot of teachers live here, but despite their unionist inclinations,
> they're no more working class than doctors with their unionist
> inclinations.

Huh? Non-working-class teachers -- living on invested wealth?


> There are a lot of independent professionals who keep the renovators
> hammering noisily along. And there are an enormous number of people in
> what is called "the knowledge industry." A knowledge worker can be
> loosely defined as anybody who spends the workday at a computer, and
> they often make a whack of dough. Riverdale has become solidly, almost
> exclusively, middle class.

Whack of dough? High-paid workers. "Independent professionals," too, in almost all cases. Unless they're living on invested wealth. Most of the folks in my sector of the economy -- freelance translators -- are in that category, and they would be horrified to be categorized as "working-class." They much prefer a term like "independent professionals" -- sounds much more dignified. But in fact, though they are not directly employed by corporations, that just means that they (including me) don't get the benefits they would get if they were so employed. In return for that, of course, we can't be fired by the big bad corps, but we can be out-sourced as easily or more easily.

Spanish and French translators put out of business by colleagues in low-cost-of-living countries are an old story, but the Internet is accelerating that trend, since text can be transferred anywhere in the world in a microsecond. As for interpreters, they used to have to be brought to a site where their services were needed, at the expense of the companies hiring them, but a lot of interpreting can be done now by international conference calls and Web conferences.

Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ "In an ideal world, people would be preoccupied with reading and writing poetry and having love affairs, as people were in the Japanese court in the 11th century, as described in 'The Tale of Genji.' If people were involved in that type of life, maybe there would be no war." -- Wallace Shawn



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